


Circuitry

by thosefarplaces



Series: Portal AU [1]
Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-21
Updated: 2014-07-21
Packaged: 2018-02-09 18:39:24
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 969
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1993608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thosefarplaces/pseuds/thosefarplaces
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Portals, masses, and artificial things</p>
            </blockquote>





	Circuitry

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bitterblue](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bitterblue/gifts).



“Ow. _Ow._ Hey!”

“Oh come off it,” Sarah mutters through gritted teeth. She reaches out again, in spite of her screaming muscles, fingers grasping – and then they close on the lip of the broken wall. She unwraps her other arm from the struts connecting Cosima to the railing overhead and pulls herself up onto the wall, panting. “You haven’t even got nerves or anything.”

“Thanks, Sarah. Thanks for killing the moment.”

She dangles her legs over the edge as she catches her breath. They’re in one of the maintenance areas of the complex - “backstage,” Cosima calls it, with a melodramatic flourish as if it were impressive instead of just a fucking mess. There’s peeling wallpaper instead of the white panels of the testing chambers, a lot more rust, not as many pits of acid, but…still a mess. Still a bloody cage. Sarah feels her hands clench and wills them to stop. The raw, pink skin where one of her nails used to be is itching like mad.

“Just because I don’t have nerves doesn’t mean I’m not breakable, dumbass.” Cosima slides up the railing to her eye level, whirring as she does a few experimental spins of her chassis. “And I do have feelings, y’know.”

She manages a grin. “You do?”

“Haha. You’re just on a roll today, aren’t you?”

It’s as close to _okay_ as things have been for a while. No bloody turrets shooting at her for once, no lasers to dodge with Cosima shouting instructions in her deafened ears. The gun is still a constant weight at her belt, but she doesn’t need it. Not right this minute. And there was even food this morning – a can of beans she found in one of the hideouts, along with more scrawled Bible quotes and the usual ominous stick figures. So between her stomach’s silence, her exhaustion, and the lull of everything, the question slips out before she really considers it. “No, seriously. D’you… have real ones?”

Cosima snorts. “You think I’ve been fake laughing at you this whole time? _Ouch_ , man. Well, psych, you caught me, I am but a mere robot. Beepboopbeepbeepbeep-”

“ _Cos_ …”

“-boopbeep-”

“-you know what I meant. I don’t know shite about AIs or how they designed you or whatever. How you…work.”

Cosima spins and narrows her eye (“Camera, really,” she explained when they met, but it could pass for an eye, and whoever designed her put some kind of black border around it that looks for all the world like eyeliner). “Fine. Insults forgiven. But only because that’s actually a super interesting question. I mean, biologically, no, I don’t, because I don’t have any biology, right? But I’ve read like every book on the experience of emotion-”

Sarah resists the urge to make a joke about how you need _hands_ to hold _books_. More ammo for later.

“-and god do you people love writing about that stuff, but anyways, it just…fits. The way I…feel, I guess, when something good happens feels the way they always describe joy, y’know? And I feel sad for sad things, feel frustrated when shit breaks. And don’t doubt for one minute that if these screws weren’t bolted on so tight I would’ve literally laughed my ass off when you nearly fell into that-”

She smiles and lets her run on, half-listening, half just drifting. They look down at the new room on the other side of the wall, and Cosima slowly falls silent. A broken staircase creeps along its side towards an empty doorway. Weeds poke through the rubble, straining towards patches of artificial sunlight.

“When were you sad, Cos?”

“Huh?”

“When were you sad,” she repeats, more gently.

“Oh, that.” Cosima twists away a little. Gives a faint laugh. “I dunno. I wasn’t _really_ , just like…it was pretty quiet here for a while. Not the most fun. And so fucking boring, oh god. The turrets can be kinda cute when they’re not homicidal, but as conversation partners? No thanks. But…still. It was an improvement over the beginning.”

She remembers the bodies she found in some of the offices. Places where Cosima’s railing couldn’t go, where there was almost no light to speak of, where even the dust, which had never been alive, felt lifeless. She swallows. “Oh.”

“Yeah.” Cosima shakes her head. Well, herself. “Dark times, man.” Then she pauses mid-swing. When she continues, the words are hesitant. “I guess you…you probably didn’t take a close look at any of them? At their faces or nametags, or…y’know.”

Most of them didn’t have much left of their faces, but she doesn’t need to know that. “I was kinda in a hurry, Cos.”

“Yeah, of course. Nevermind.”

“You looking for someone?”

There’s a brief, halting click. No other answer.

“Cos?”

For someone whose voice is, in her own words, a bunch of cheap frequency-modulating software, Cosima gives a very heavy sigh. “Just a friend.” The last word glitches slightly. “Anyways, we shouldn’t get too comfy here, huh? Time to get back on the road.”

Sarah tries to picture the full scope of this place, not for the first time. And it’s overwhelming. It’s a fucking labyrinth. With all that space, it’s possible that Cosima’s friend – whoever they were – made it out, but…she remembers the bodies crumpled on floors, dried-out skin stretched tightly across their bones. She just nods.

The walls in the new room accept portals with ease, and she slips past the break in the staircase, the usual tingle running across her bare arms as she crosses the colored thresholds. Cosima follows overhead, lost in her own thoughts. In the next chamber, as she falls through one portal to soar out another, Sarah imagines for a moment that she has wings. She imagines that there’s real sunlight on them.


End file.
